Once reliant on its sausage plant, Alachua's economy is now diverse, high-tech

Published: Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 6:01 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, November 16, 2013 at 10:34 p.m.

Forty years ago, the city of Alachua was largely a one-company town. Nearly 500 people worked at Copeland Sausage.

The small town was devastated when the sausage plant closed in 1978, said Mayor Gib Coerper, who moved to Alachua in 1974. Copeland Sausage accounted for more than 40 percent of the town's utility revenues and half of the tax revenue, he said.

Downtown buildings were boarded up in the years after Copeland closed.

"The city literally came real close to shutting down," Coerper said.

Coerper credits prior city leaders with making hard decisions to diversify the town's economy, luring businesses with connections to water and sewer lines, tax breaks and commercial zoning. The city's boundaries grew through voluntary annexations that took in new and existing businesses.

Today, Alachua is home to three distribution centers in close proximity to Interstate 75, as well as a handful of electrical and industrial manufacturers.

The town has also benefited from the University of Florida's decision in the early 1980s to acquire hundreds of acres on the south side of the city, including the Copeland property, as a place to develop companies to commercialize research inventions, particularly in biotechnology.

Since the first building opened in 1987, Progress Corporate Park has grown to about 20 buildings housing 30 companies that employ 1,200 people, including nearly 1,000 at UF spinoff companies.

On and around the same property where 35 years earlier Copeland employees butchered hogs to make sausage, bologna and hot dogs, employees in high-tech fields are making surgical implants from human donor tissue, treatments for genetic diseases, blood tests for brain injuries and microbes to kill plant nematodes.

While Copeland drew workers from the town and surrounding areas for low-wage jobs that required no prior education, the companies there now draw workers with specialized degrees from all over the nation and world, many of whom came to study at UF before going to work in their fields of expertise.

Chemical company Alchem Laboratories Corp. exemplifies the new dynamic. Founder Emil Pop left Romania 30 years ago to study organic chemistry at UF and went to work for a pharmaceutical company started by a professor in Alachua.

After the business was acquired and later moved away, he opened his chemical company in 1998 a stone's throw from the old Copeland plant to do contract research and development and small scale manufacturing of chemical compounds, mostly for the pharmaceutical industry.

Of 16 employees, 10 have doctoral degrees in chemistry with several years of postdoctoral experience before coming to work for Alchem. Just a few employees hail from the area. The rest are from China, Russia, the Ukraine and throughout the U.S., which Pop said is typical in the industry.

Wednesday morning found senior research scientist Guangfei Huang in a white lab coat, goggles and respirator mask reaching into a fume hood with a spatula to pull from a filter a compound used to treat ovarian cancer.

In another room, research chemist Michelle Kuntz diluted a compound in a vial of liquid, placed the vial in a rack and slid it into a machine that resembles a computer server called a high-pressure liquid chromatography machine while a computer monitor graphed lines and peaks to indicate the purity of the compound.

From his office, Pop said his business could be anywhere since it serves clients all over the world, but he has grown to love the Gainesville area. Even with the presence of pharmaceutical companies nearby, Alchem has not had a lot of local business, with the exception of Nanotherapeutics.

"Alachua for a long time was planned to be a hub for new companies," Pop said. "It was sluggish, but it started to pick up really in the last 10 years, I would say."

Thomas Rose agrees. Rose is executive vice president of administration for RTI Surgical, Alachua's largest biotech company with about 500 local employees.

He said Progress Park was "pretty sleepy" in the early 2000s.

"It seems like we've had some successful startups and some new folks building things, so the last five years has been a growth period," Rose said.

"The other piece of the puzzle is Alachua used to be looked at as a long way away from Gainesville and hard to get to," he said. "We don't hear that anymore. There's plenty of housing for people both here and in High Springs. That promotes a healthy job market."

Of the 500 employees at RTI Surgical, about a quarter work in logistics, which includes warehousing and purchasing. Rose said the company has been able to hire logistics employees from the nearby distribution centers.

Processing employees either have or are in the midst of acquiring associate or bachelor's degrees in technical medical fields such as nursing, Rose said. The preference is for people with experience in a "clean room" environment working with surgical instruments.

Entry-level pay is $12 an hour, or about $25,000 a year, plus overtime. Mechanical engineering degrees are common for the higher-skill, higher-wage supervisory and technical jobs.

RTI is also in the process of building a 41,000-square-foot building that will include a clean room for stem cell processing to make bone grafts and will be hiring 10 to 15 technicians with master's degrees in biology or related fields, Rose said.

Santa Fe College opened the Perry Center for Emerging Technologies across U.S. 441 from Progress Corporate Park in 2009 to prepare students for lab work in biotech.

The biotech program includes an associate degree for entry-level technicians and this semester added a bachelor's degree in industrial biotech. Since the program started in 2002, before moving to Alachua, about 140 students have completed training.

Students intern at Alachua companies such as RTI, Nanotherapeutics and Banyan Biomarkers, with the internships usually developing into full-time jobs, said Mary El-Semarani, coordinator of the Biotechnology Laboratory Technology Program.

Associate-level jobs pay around $27,000 to $33,000, she said, while the bachelor's-level jobs pay in the high $40,000 to low $50,000 range.

El-Semarani said about half their associate's degree students moved into the bachelor's program since it started. Of the other half, 90 percent find work in biotech.

The company started in the UF Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator in Progress Corporate Park in 1999 after devising a way to make new and existing drugs more effective using nanoscale particle technology It now employs 65 people in a nearby lab and office building. The company declined to comment for this article.

The facility is being built to fulfill the company's contract with the Department of Defense awarded in March to develop and manufacture drugs to treat bioterrorism and radiological threats and develop manufacturing processes for other manufacturers. When it opens, Nanotherapeutics plans to ramp up to 150 employees with an average salary of $90,000.

"Obviously anything like that is going to help in Alachua. There's no question about it," said Rick Robertson, owner of Conestogas Restaurant on Main Street in downtown Alachua.

Robertson said his business has benefited from the growth of Progress Corporate Park and the distribution centers in the past, although his lunch business has been off since the recession hit.

"RTI is the biggest thing," he said. "When they built that new building out there, that's when I really saw stuff going on."

When Conestogas opened in 1988, he said Main Street "sort of looked like a ghost town" with boarded-up buildings. There were fewer than 10 restaurants in Alachua compared with about 30 today.

Main Street itself has gone from eight restaurants before the recession started to three now, plus a caterer that serves meals twice a week. However, more restaurants have opened in other shopping centers in town in recent years.

Larry Thigpen has lived in Alachua for all his 73 years. He remembers when he could go downtown and know everyone. Families came in from nearby farms on Saturdays to go shopping, including at his father's business, Thigpen Drugstore.

"Now when you go downtown to Conestogas or somewhere, you don't recognize most of the folks," he said. "You've gone from a small downtown environment to a larger small town environment."

Back in the days, those who weren't farmers worked at Copeland Sausage or Duke Lumber Company, he recalled.

Thigpen worked at Copeland part time after high school starting in 1958 and full time after graduating from college from 1962 until it closed in 1978. He worked first in sales, later in computers, quality control and livestock.

Copeland Sausage was founded by three brothers in 1928 and sold to J.J. Switch and Noel McGehee in 1948. Green Giant bought it in 1970 before selling it to Illini Beef Packers of Illinois in 1977.

The jobs were low-skill and low-wage. Thigpen said starting pay was minimum wage.

"I remember when it went to $1 an hour," he said.

"We killed about 1,000 hogs a day. We had a huge crew that killed and cut up the hogs," Thigpen said.

They also had a large night crew that loaded trucks and cleaned the plant.

When the plant closed, Thigpen got a job in information technology for the Florida Farm Bureau, retiring after 30 years.

Most of Copeland's employees went to Gainesville to find work, Coerper said.

After the hit Alachua took from the plant closing, city leaders did not want it to happen again, he said.

When the former General Electric and Energizer battery plant, then owned by Moltec, closed in 2002, the job losses were offset by the new Dollar General, Walmart and Sysco distribution centers.

Since 1977, Copeland's last full year of operation, the city's property tax revenues grew from $32,079 to $3.7 million last year, with $1.3 million from commercial and industrial property. Electric utility revenues went from $1.2 million to $12.5 million, with $8.1 million from commercial users.

The town has nearly as many jobs as working-age adults. Of a 2012 estimated population of 9,272, nearly 5,700 were ages 18-65, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, the last year statistics are available, 322 firms employed 5,391 people in the city.

Coerper said he thinks city government is in good shape, although it had to cut back during the recession. Housing permits are up and biotech companies continue to announce multimillion-dollar investments. The city recently rezoned a 280-acre parcel owned by the UF Foundation next to Progress Corporate Park that could house a large corporate campus.

"There's other things in the pipeline I can't talk about right now," Coerper said. "The future could be pretty bright."

<p>Forty years ago, the city of Alachua was largely a one-company town. Nearly 500 people worked at Copeland Sausage.</p><p>The small town was devastated when the sausage plant closed in 1978, said Mayor Gib Coerper, who moved to Alachua in 1974. Copeland Sausage accounted for more than 40 percent of the town's utility revenues and half of the tax revenue, he said.</p><p>Downtown buildings were boarded up in the years after Copeland closed.</p><p>"The city literally came real close to shutting down," Coerper said.</p><p>Coerper credits prior city leaders with making hard decisions to diversify the town's economy, luring businesses with connections to water and sewer lines, tax breaks and commercial zoning. The city's boundaries grew through voluntary annexations that took in new and existing businesses.</p><p>Today, Alachua is home to three distribution centers in close proximity to Interstate 75, as well as a handful of electrical and industrial manufacturers.</p><p>The town has also benefited from the University of Florida's decision in the early 1980s to acquire hundreds of acres on the south side of the city, including the Copeland property, as a place to develop companies to commercialize research inventions, particularly in biotechnology.</p><p>Since the first building opened in 1987, Progress Corporate Park has grown to about 20 buildings housing 30 companies that employ 1,200 people, including nearly 1,000 at UF spinoff companies.</p><p>On and around the same property where 35 years earlier Copeland employees butchered hogs to make sausage, bologna and hot dogs, employees in high-tech fields are making surgical implants from human donor tissue, treatments for genetic diseases, blood tests for brain injuries and microbes to kill plant nematodes.</p><p>While Copeland drew workers from the town and surrounding areas for low-wage jobs that required no prior education, the companies there now draw workers with specialized degrees from all over the nation and world, many of whom came to study at UF before going to work in their fields of expertise.</p><p>Chemical company Alchem Laboratories Corp. exemplifies the new dynamic. Founder Emil Pop left Romania 30 years ago to study organic chemistry at UF and went to work for a pharmaceutical company started by a professor in Alachua.</p><p>After the business was acquired and later moved away, he opened his chemical company in 1998 a stone's throw from the old Copeland plant to do contract research and development and small scale manufacturing of chemical compounds, mostly for the pharmaceutical industry.</p><p>Of 16 employees, 10 have doctoral degrees in chemistry with several years of postdoctoral experience before coming to work for Alchem. Just a few employees hail from the area. The rest are from China, Russia, the Ukraine and throughout the U.S., which Pop said is typical in the industry.</p><p>Wednesday morning found senior research scientist Guangfei Huang in a white lab coat, goggles and respirator mask reaching into a fume hood with a spatula to pull from a filter a compound used to treat ovarian cancer.</p><p>In another room, research chemist Michelle Kuntz diluted a compound in a vial of liquid, placed the vial in a rack and slid it into a machine that resembles a computer server called a high-pressure liquid chromatography machine while a computer monitor graphed lines and peaks to indicate the purity of the compound.</p><p>From his office, Pop said his business could be anywhere since it serves clients all over the world, but he has grown to love the Gainesville area. Even with the presence of pharmaceutical companies nearby, Alchem has not had a lot of local business, with the exception of Nanotherapeutics.</p><p>"Alachua for a long time was planned to be a hub for new companies," Pop said. "It was sluggish, but it started to pick up really in the last 10 years, I would say."</p><p>Thomas Rose agrees. Rose is executive vice president of administration for RTI Surgical, Alachua's largest biotech company with about 500 local employees.</p><p>He said Progress Park was "pretty sleepy" in the early 2000s.</p><p>"It seems like we've had some successful startups and some new folks building things, so the last five years has been a growth period," Rose said.</p><p>"The other piece of the puzzle is Alachua used to be looked at as a long way away from Gainesville and hard to get to," he said. "We don't hear that anymore. There's plenty of housing for people both here and in High Springs. That promotes a healthy job market."</p><p>Of the 500 employees at RTI Surgical, about a quarter work in logistics, which includes warehousing and purchasing. Rose said the company has been able to hire logistics employees from the nearby distribution centers.</p><p>About half work in management, engineering and support positions.</p><p>Between 170 and 180 employees process human donor tissue for surgical implants.</p><p>Processing employees either have or are in the midst of acquiring associate or bachelor's degrees in technical medical fields such as nursing, Rose said. The preference is for people with experience in a "clean room" environment working with surgical instruments.</p><p>Entry-level pay is $12 an hour, or about $25,000 a year, plus overtime. Mechanical engineering degrees are common for the higher-skill, higher-wage supervisory and technical jobs.</p><p>RTI is also in the process of building a 41,000-square-foot building that will include a clean room for stem cell processing to make bone grafts and will be hiring 10 to 15 technicians with master's degrees in biology or related fields, Rose said.</p><p>Santa Fe College opened the Perry Center for Emerging Technologies across U.S. 441 from Progress Corporate Park in 2009 to prepare students for lab work in biotech.</p><p>The biotech program includes an associate degree for entry-level technicians and this semester added a bachelor's degree in industrial biotech. Since the program started in 2002, before moving to Alachua, about 140 students have completed training.</p><p>Students intern at Alachua companies such as RTI, Nanotherapeutics and Banyan Biomarkers, with the internships usually developing into full-time jobs, said Mary El-Semarani, coordinator of the Biotechnology Laboratory Technology Program.</p><p>Associate-level jobs pay around $27,000 to $33,000, she said, while the bachelor's-level jobs pay in the high $40,000 to low $50,000 range.</p><p>El-Semarani said about half their associate's degree students moved into the bachelor's program since it started. Of the other half, 90 percent find work in biotech.</p><p>Coerper pointed out Alachua's progress during the Oct. 23 groundbreaking ceremony for Nanotherapeutics' $135 million, 165,000-square-foot facility on Copeland's former property.</p><p>The company started in the UF Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator in Progress Corporate Park in 1999 after devising a way to make new and existing drugs more effective using nanoscale particle technology It now employs 65 people in a nearby lab and office building. The company declined to comment for this article.</p><p>The facility is being built to fulfill the company's contract with the Department of Defense awarded in March to develop and manufacture drugs to treat bioterrorism and radiological threats and develop manufacturing processes for other manufacturers. When it opens, Nanotherapeutics plans to ramp up to 150 employees with an average salary of $90,000.</p><p>"Obviously anything like that is going to help in Alachua. There's no question about it," said Rick Robertson, owner of Conestogas Restaurant on Main Street in downtown Alachua.</p><p>Robertson said his business has benefited from the growth of Progress Corporate Park and the distribution centers in the past, although his lunch business has been off since the recession hit.</p><p>"RTI is the biggest thing," he said. "When they built that new building out there, that's when I really saw stuff going on."</p><p>When Conestogas opened in 1988, he said Main Street "sort of looked like a ghost town" with boarded-up buildings. There were fewer than 10 restaurants in Alachua compared with about 30 today.</p><p>Main Street itself has gone from eight restaurants before the recession started to three now, plus a caterer that serves meals twice a week. However, more restaurants have opened in other shopping centers in town in recent years.</p><p>Larry Thigpen has lived in Alachua for all his 73 years. He remembers when he could go downtown and know everyone. Families came in from nearby farms on Saturdays to go shopping, including at his father's business, Thigpen Drugstore.</p><p>"Now when you go downtown to Conestogas or somewhere, you don't recognize most of the folks," he said. "You've gone from a small downtown environment to a larger small town environment."</p><p>Back in the days, those who weren't farmers worked at Copeland Sausage or Duke Lumber Company, he recalled.</p><p>Thigpen worked at Copeland part time after high school starting in 1958 and full time after graduating from college from 1962 until it closed in 1978. He worked first in sales, later in computers, quality control and livestock.</p><p>Copeland Sausage was founded by three brothers in 1928 and sold to J.J. Switch and Noel McGehee in 1948. Green Giant bought it in 1970 before selling it to Illini Beef Packers of Illinois in 1977.</p><p>The jobs were low-skill and low-wage. Thigpen said starting pay was minimum wage.</p><p>"I remember when it went to $1 an hour," he said.</p><p>"We killed about 1,000 hogs a day. We had a huge crew that killed and cut up the hogs," Thigpen said.</p><p>They also had a large night crew that loaded trucks and cleaned the plant.</p><p>When the plant closed, Thigpen got a job in information technology for the Florida Farm Bureau, retiring after 30 years.</p><p>Most of Copeland's employees went to Gainesville to find work, Coerper said.</p><p>After the hit Alachua took from the plant closing, city leaders did not want it to happen again, he said.</p><p>When the former General Electric and Energizer battery plant, then owned by Moltec, closed in 2002, the job losses were offset by the new Dollar General, Walmart and Sysco distribution centers.</p><p>Since 1977, Copeland's last full year of operation, the city's property tax revenues grew from $32,079 to $3.7 million last year, with $1.3 million from commercial and industrial property. Electric utility revenues went from $1.2 million to $12.5 million, with $8.1 million from commercial users.</p><p>The town has nearly as many jobs as working-age adults. Of a 2012 estimated population of 9,272, nearly 5,700 were ages 18-65, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, the last year statistics are available, 322 firms employed 5,391 people in the city.</p><p>Coerper said he thinks city government is in good shape, although it had to cut back during the recession. Housing permits are up and biotech companies continue to announce multimillion-dollar investments. The city recently rezoned a 280-acre parcel owned by the UF Foundation next to Progress Corporate Park that could house a large corporate campus.</p><p>"There's other things in the pipeline I can't talk about right now," Coerper said. "The future could be pretty bright."</p>